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Harsh Adventures: Books About Travel

A passion for adventure in some of the world’s harshest environments courses through many of this season’s travel books. Following in the footsteps of polar explorers, wandering novelists and tropical archaeologists, writers test their mettle in spots as varied as Greenland, Peru and Liberia. Along the way, they offer a wealth of cautionary tips to would-be extreme adventurers: don’t slip even the smallest ancient artifact into your backpack, be careful of unlabeled cans of food and never wear only one pair of socks when hiking through the jungle.

In THE UNCONQUERED: In Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes (Crown, $26), Scott Wallace embarks on a journey into uncharted regions of the Amazon rain forest, an environment “at once fantastic and horrifying, an untouched Garden of Eden and an unmitigated Green Hell.” On assignment for National Geographic, he sets out to profile Sydney Possuelo, founding director of Brazil’s Department of Isolated Indians, a government agency dedicated to identifying and protecting a handful of tribes that have shunned all contact with the outside world.

With Possuelo and his 34-man team of local Indians and Amazon frontiersmen, Wallace travels through the Javari Valley Indigenous Reserve gathering information about a mysterious, reputedly violent tribe known as the flecheiros, or Arrow People. But it soon becomes clear that the bigger danger may come from Possuelo, a moody megalomaniac who mercilessly castigates his men — when not cheerfully belting out the chorus of “New York, New York.” As the members of Possuelo’s team march deeper into the rain forest, Wallace likens them to the doomed conquistadors in “Aguirre: The Wrath of God.” “There were times when it felt like we were on the film’s real-life set,” he explains, “a half-unhinged Klaus Kinski at the helm.”

Wallace’s trip doesn’t quite assume Werner Herzogian proportions, but mishaps and near disasters beset the expedition from the start. Long slogs through arduous terrain, the “insistent gloom” of the jungle and Possuelo’s temper tantrums fill the men with “a collective angst . . . a sense of drifting terribly off course.” Their food runs out, and airdropped supplies disappear, prompting accusations of theft and hoarding. The expedition’s chef is plagued by nightmares of vengeful, knife-wielding monkeys after chopping up a batch of slaughtered simians for dinner. And there are fleeting, terrifying glimpses of the Arrow People, who leave behind in one hastily abandoned village a vat of curare, “the sticky black poison that, when painted on the point of an arrow or dart, asphyxiates its victim within minutes by inducing paralysis.”

Yet Wallace’s sense of foreboding is matched by his wonder — at the resourcefulness of the Indian expedition members, at the alien beauty of the jungle and even at Possuelo, who “seemed to grasp intuitively what pleased” the Indians and “what made them angry, what made them feel respected and what did not. . . . With whites, he could be surly, contemptuous, explosive. With Indians, he was possessed of charm, patience and good humor.” Wallace makes a passionate case for Possuelo’s mission — keeping the Indians and their pristine environment safe from loggers, gold miners and other intruders. “The tribes,” he writes with typical eloquence, “were the patrimony not only of the nation, but of all humanity.”

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Credit
R.O. Blechman

Mark Adams’s ebullient TURN RIGHT AT MACHU PICCHU: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time (Dutton, $26.95) retraces the journey made a century ago by Hiram Bingham, the Yale professor who “discovered” the now famous city of the Incas and indirectly served as the inspiration for Indiana Jones. Adams joins an Australian adventurer named John Leivers for a trek deep into the Peruvian backcountry, a journey that feels to Adams “like descending into a forgotten world. . . . I half expected to hear the roar of a Tyrannosaurus or the shriek of a pterodactyl.” The book seamlessly joins three narrative threads: the brutal 16th-century conquest of the Incas by the Spanish conquistadors and the subsequent retreat of the rebellious ruler, Manco Inca, into a series of jungle redoubts; Bingham’s 1911 expedition that retraced Manco’s flight; and Adams’s own mishap-filled recreation of Bingham’s trip a century later.

Adams, a long-deskbound editor of adventure travel magazines, soon realizes that he’s ill prepared for the rigors of the journey, and not just in his physical conditioning; between his “microfiber bwana costume” and the bags of candy the porter supplies him, he “could have been trick-or-treating as Hemingway.” Later, after neglecting to observe the “Wear Two Pairs of Socks Rule” known to veteran hikers, he examines his painfully battered feet: “My little toes looked like the sort of meat that ends up in hot dogs.”

Adams paints an engrossing portrait of Bingham, the Honolulu-born missionary’s son who combined ruthless ambition, supreme self-confidence and occasional cluelessness. (The first draft of the article he submitted to National Geographic about his Machu Picchu expedition apparently skipped over the actual discovery, prompting his editor gently to point out that “our readers will want to know how you found it.”) Weighing the charges of ­antiquities theft that dogged Bingham throughout his career and led to a lawsuit filed by the Peruvian government against Yale University, Adams concludes that Bingham did illegally expropriate artifacts, but also promised to return them one day. (Yale settled the suit in 2010, agreeing to repatriate thousands of items to a museum in Cuzco.) Adams also ponders both the majesty and the riddle of the rediscovered city, with its enigmatic structures and “distant peaks ringing the ruin like a necklace.” Bingham theorized (erroneously, it turns out) that Machu Picchu marked the site of Tampu Tocco, the mythical birthplace of the original Incas. But, as Adams observes in this engaging and sometimes hilarious book, Machu Picchu’s allure rests on the fact that it “is always going to be something of a mystery.”

Another great pre-Columbian civilization takes center stage in Gerard Helferich’s STONE OF KINGS: In Search of the Lost Jade of the Maya (Lyons, $24.95). Here Helferich tells the story of the search for the long-vanished mines of the Mayas and their predecessors, the Olmecs — the source of the venerated stone used to make ritual masks, jewelry and burial gifts for their dead kings. Helferich works hard to pump up the drama, chronicling the long quest by an eccentric American couple, Jay Ridinger and Mary Lou Johnson, to locate these jade deposits along the banks of a river in Guatemala. Ridinger and Johnson endured earthquakes, coups, kidnappings, even civil war. But eventually they stumbled upon huge blocks of the alluring, elusive stone.

Helferich delivers sometimes engaging digressions into plate tectonics, the technology of jade carving and the brutal history of the regimes of a succession of Guatemalan generals, but his book is hampered by a lack of immediacy (Helferich conducted his interviews years after the fact) and by some awkward writing. (“When the plane tipped its wings over the city, great ravines came into view, with more ramshackle houses clinging doggedly.”) In the end, Helferich fails to extract enough excitement from the tale. Discovering a possible source for the Olmecs’ distinctive blue jade, he quotes a geologist who says he was “thunderstruck.” The reader, alas, isn’t apt to share that feeling.

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The city of the Incas in "Turn Right at Machu Picchu."Credit
Courtesy of Mark Adams

In his first book, “Blood River,” the former Daily Telegraph correspondent Tim Butcher followed Henry Morton Stanley’s hellish journey across what is now Congo — except Butcher rode a motorbike through war-racked jungles populated by destitute villagers and venal soldiers. In CHASING THE DEVIL: A Journey Through Sub-Saharan Africa in the Footsteps of Graham Greene (Atlas, $26.95), Butcher submits himself to even greater punishment. Retracing a 1935 trip through Sierra Leone and Liberia made by Graham Greene on behalf of a British antislavery organization, Butcher and a young companion encounter a wasteland almost thoroughly destroyed by years of conflict.

Like Greene, who was accompanied by his socialite cousin, Barbara, and wrote a classic travel book about the trip, “Journey Without Maps,” Butcher begins his adventure in Freetown. Sierra Leone’s seaside capital is still a traumatized wreck, long after its invasion by forces backed by the warlord Charles Taylor. Butcher’s journey east toward the Liberian border takes him on long-­neglected roads that seem “like narrowing blood vessels in a diseased liver getting more sclerotic and ineffective. . . . Often I saw the skeletons of vehicular roadkill, abandoned trucks and vans that had reached the end of their road in Sierra Leone’s wild east.”

But the heart of the trip is a trek along jungle paths in Liberia, a country founded by freed American slaves in the mid-19th century and brutalized for decades by a succession of rebel groups. In villages where gangs of child soldiers once looted, raped and killed with abandon, Butcher nurses his blisters in vermin-infested huts, sates his hunger with cans of what turns out to be cat food, catches glimpses of a sinister bush society known as the Poro and notes that even after the imposition of peace, “the impact of Liberia’s central government is almost nonexistent.” He also meets village elders who remember Greene’s visit and perceives an unfamiliar side of the great writer — not the “sophisticate who was most comfortable dealing with rarefied issues of human morality and spiritual belief” but the self-reliant adventurer.

Butcher has an observant eye and a wicked sense of humor. “The postapocalyptic array of war-damaged buildings looked reassuringly familiar,” he writes, arriving in one forlorn town, “as did the potholed roads, hawkers selling sachets of alcohol and the roadside health notice in English urging people to ‘bury all poo poo.’ ” Ultimately, however, Butcher’s account of ruin and desolation grows dispiritingly monotonous. By the time he reaches the port of Buchanan, the reader is likely to echo Greene’s caustic view of his own travels through the region: “It was the end, the end to the worst boredom I had ever experienced, the worst fear and the worst exhaustion.”

Meredith Hooper’s thrilling account THE LONGEST WINTER: Scott’s Other Heroes (Counterpoint, $26) revisits Robert Scott’s doomed 1911 race to the South Pole from an unusual perspective: that of six supporting members of the expedition who faced their own horrors a few hundred miles away. Left behind by Scott to make scientific excursions across an unexplored region called Victoria Land, Lt. Victor Campbell and his five companions expected to be picked up at the end of their tour by a supply ship, the Terra Nova. “But schedules based on assumptions were particularly vulnerable in Antarctica,” Hooper ominously notes. “The place was not enigmatic or heartless. It was, by definition, indifferent.”

After repeated attempts to penetrate the sea ice and retrieve the men, the captain of the Terra Nova gave up, leaving the members of the group to fend for themselves as the savage winter approached. “The unceasing gale forced fine crystals of snow through the pores of the threadbare material” as the men hunkered down in their tents, “covering everything in brief crusts of white that melted, wetting further the already wet. Blinding drift made it impossible to get outside or see anything.”

What follows is a tale of survival that rivals that of Sir Ernest Shackleton and the crew of the Endurance. As Scott pursued his fatal contest with the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, Campbell and his men burrowed into an ice cave and waited out the six-month winter. Lying side by side for days in round-the-clock darkness, they subsisted on seal meat and blubber, enduring ferocious blizzards and fighting off everything from diarrhea to psoriasis, from frostbite to food poisoning.

“The filthy dense smoke from the blubber fires inflamed everyone’s eyes, resulting in ‘stove blindness’ or conjunctivitis.” A dwindling supply of biscuits was rationed to last for months, and penguins were slaughtered and carefully allocated so that no part went to waste: “The blubber for lamp oil, skin for the cooking stoves and the flippers to brush the floor, and their clothes.” The ordeal culminated with a 200-mile sledge journey to what the men assumed would be a reunion with the other members of the expedition. Learning that Scott had frozen to death on his way back from the pole, Campbell and his fellow survivors resigned themselves to being, as Hooper nicely puts it, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the supporting cast to a heroic tragedy.”

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Amundsen makes a more extended appearance in Lynne Cox’s SOUTH WITH THE SUN: Roald Amundsen, His Polar Explorations, and the Quest for Discovery (Knopf, $26), a quasi biography of the Norwegian explorer by the noted long-distance swimmer. Cox uses fragments of Amundsen’s life story — principally his successful search for the Northwest Passage in the first years of the 20th century — as the catalyst for her own Arctic adventure. Stopping off in entrepôts from Barrow, Alaska, to Baffin Island, Canada, she seeks out traces of Amundsen’s voyage and takes her own plunges into freezing waters.

The author of an earlier book, “Swimming to Antarctica,” Cox has an occasional weakness for clichés. (“Amundsen’s heart was pounding in his chest,” she writes of his encounter with his boyhood idol, Fridtjof Nansen. A few chapters later, she notes that Amundsen’s meeting with a famed German scientist made him “so nervous that his heart was pounding in his chest.”) But her enthusiasm and energy are infectious. And she effectively conveys the dramatic desolation of Arctic landscapes — “the craggy mountain faces, the deep blue fjords and the wild white cresting sea.” Yet Cox doesn’t shy away from the darker side of life in the polar regions, describing the alcoholism that besets Inuit communities, where mouthwash and shoe polish are kept under lock and key in the local co-op store.

The most exhilarating parts of the book are Cox’s descriptions of her swims. “I took a deep breath and stepped off the rock. My feet touched the ledge, and in 20 seconds my arms, legs and torso were numb,” she writes of crossing Church Bay in Ilulissat, Greenland, where the water temperature is 28.8 degrees Fahrenheit. “The water was like liquid ice, and I was fighting from the start, just to move fast enough to create warmth.”

Cox finds parallels between her own push to the limits and Amundsen’s a century earlier. “I had traveled through the same Arctic world as Amundsen had,” she exults after climbing out of the jellyfish-infested Chukchi Sea off Barrow, “a place where one misstep could mean disaster.”

Joshua Hammer, a former Newsweek bureau chief, is a freelance foreign correspondent. He is writing a book about German colonialism in southern Africa.